Dragon Inn 3 Pays Homage To '80s & '90s Clichés In 'Backstabber' Video

Dragon Inn 3 is the synth-pop project led by Philip Dickey, lead singer of the indie-pop band Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin. The seeds of the trio were planted when the group contributed original music to the short comedic horror film Ghoul School. For the EP of the original soundtrack, Dickey was joined by his sister, Sharon Bowie, and his wife, Grace Bentley, to help with songwriting and vocal duties.

Since then, in between full-time jobs, parenthood, graduate school classes, and cross country moves, the members of Dragon Inn 3 put together their debut album, Double Line, on American Laundromat Records. World Cafe is premiering the video for the single "Backstabber," directed by Josh Pfaff and Locke and Stache.

Musically, "Backstabber" captures the spiritual bounce and pop of the 1981 classic "Don't You Want Me" by The Human League. The video itself is an homage to everything we loved about John Hughes' movies, MTV videos and Miami Vice.

In an e-mail, Dickey told us about the video for "Backstabber."

"Both Dragon Inn 3 and Locke and Stache started in Springfield, Missouri so we wanted the music video to not only be shot in Springfield but also to have some local history in the story. We took a famous Springfield missing person case and the significance of National Audio Company (being the only manufacturer of audio cassettes in the United States) and mashed them together into a music video. We ended up with a '90s comedy crime thriller about Dragon Inn 3's cassette tapes causing teenagers to disappear after they listened to them.

Our goal with "Backstabber" was to make a visually stunning montage music video with as many '80s/'90s clichés that we could think of. There had to be someone dancing, a foreign bad guy, a smoking detective, a crazy wall, corporate conspiracy, and a bathroom scene. We pulled a lot of inspiration from movies like Christine, War Games, The Lost Boys, Back to the Future and Pretty Woman.

From concept to completion we had less than three weeks to make "Backstabber" for the visual album release. We wrote a script in 48 hours and ended up shooting 25 scenes at 11 locations with 16 actors in five nights."

Double Line is out now on American Laundromat Records.

Copyright 2018 XPN. To see more, visit XPN.